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The Nouveau Project

It’s been mentioned in one of my previous posts. Now, I’m putting it forward due to some progress...

Nouveau, or how to make new free stuff

NVIDIA and their love/hate relationship with Linux

Yes, I am referring to the kernel itself here. Why love and hate? Let’s take the reasons one by one.

Love: GNU/Linux uses OpenGL extensively; the default 3D API on this system is Mesa, which is an SGI-approved free implementation of the OpenGL language. NVIDIA like OpenGL.

Love:

Linux likes clusters. It allows 3D rendering jobs to be done very efficiently. Applications running on Linux based systems will make use of OpenGL’s strength of being able to do real time, visual rendering, or batch processed, CPU only rendering indifferently. It is, Flexible.

Due to the multi-user, multi-context environment, doing 3D on GNU/Linux systems stretches the software and the hardware to its utmost limits. Let’s just say, bragging rights without having to reinvent the wheel.

The clients will usually bring up problems and possible solutions faster than you’d believe it possible.

Hate:

Linux doesn’t offer (yet) a way to say when the graphics subsystem is in use (for example, when the CLI framebuffer is used), thus initializing the driver may be risky if, say, the kernel’s NVIDIA-optimized framebuffer is loaded (this should be fixed soon).

In graphics, the driver is as important as the hardware (Matrox proved how much a sucking driver could drive great hardware into the ground, see Matrox Mystique and G100/G200); freeing the source is dangerous.

You have to recompile the driver for any new kernel compilation.

The libraries paths (and sometimes, names) change from one version of GNU/Linux to the other.

These reasons explain:

why NVIDIA publishes new Linux drivers almost as fast as it does Windows drivers,

why the source code they provide for the free driver is so uncool and obfuscated.

The Nouveau project

Nouveau is French for “New”; it came from an IRC discussion where one of the original authors said he wanted to rewrite and improve the current X11 nv driver, and his IRC client automatically replaced “nv” with “nouveau”—it stuck.

It's just that funding without the staff/structure behind to use this funding is like mounting a turbo on a twin-flat, outdated engine: appreciated, but pretty much useless. "Cautère sur jambe de bois". In fact, if you want to contribute materially, you could get a Quattro (or other rare Nvidia board) and send Renouveau dumps to the devs: they'd appreciate that even more. Or send them the card :)
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A computer is like air conditioning: it becomes useless when you open windows.

As a matter of fact, you need to consider machines too - like, PPC-based beasts, or machines in which to plug those cards.
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A computer is like air conditioning: it becomes useless when you open windows.